The fifth tab is the flight bag's junk-drawer problem, solved. Tools gathers every utility in Pilot EFB - unit converters, wind and descent calculators, planning helpers, checklists, timers, a scratchpad, expense records - in one place, organised the way you would narrate a sortie rather than alphabetically. Nearly all of it runs entirely on the device, offline, and nearly all of it is free. This chapter is a tour of the cabinet: how to find a tool fast, and a close look at a few that show how the whole family behaves.

One tab, every utility

The hub opens on three zones. A search box pinned at the top - it never scrolls away, so you can filter from anywhere in the list. A Pinned row of your own shortcuts: it starts with sensible defaults (Unit converters, Descent & approach, Crosswind, Fuel uplift), and Manage lets you swap in up to eight of your own. And below, the full browse menu. As you use tools, a Recently used row appears between the two, so the tool you reached for on yesterday's turnaround is one tap away today.

The Tools tab hub: title Tools with subtitle Conversions, calculators, checklists, a Search tools box, a Pinned row with Unit converters, Descent & approach, Crosswind and Fuel uplift tiles plus a dashed Pin tile, then the Plan & file section starting with Flight plan form and Airport distance tiles — The hub: sticky search, your pinned shortcuts, and the full menu below.

Browse by phase of flight

The browse menu groups every tool by where it belongs in a flying day: Plan & file, Fuel, Wind & runway, Descent & approach, Conversions, Time & sun, Reference & learn, and Logbook & admin. The calculators that live inside a hub browse as their own tiles too - Required ROD, Top of descent and the rest sit right beside the Descent & approach hub that houses them - so nothing is buried two taps deep.

Descent & approach in the browse grid: the hub tile, then its calculators as tiles of their own.

Prefer typing? The search box reaches every tool in the tab, including each calculator inside the converter and descent hubs - more than forty destinations from one field.

The Tools search with wind typed: 3 results - Crosswind and Wind triangle tagged Wind & runway, and Holding pattern tagged Descent & approach — Search cuts across every section - and tags each result with where it lives.

What is in the cabinet

The full catalogue, by section. Everything here is free except Per-diem.

Section	Tools
Plan & file	Flight plan form, Airport distance, Track correction (the 1-in-60 rule), Weights
Fuel	Fuel uplift, Fuel burn, Fuel temperature
Wind & runway	Crosswind, Wind triangle
Descent & approach	The Descent hub's eight calculators, Holding pattern, Cold-temp correction
Conversions	The Unit converters hub - speed, distance, altitude, temperature, mass, pressure, Mach, true airspeed, time, density altitude, runway distance, coordinates and a pressure-altitude reference
Time & sun	World clock, EET and ETA, Sunrise / sunset, Timers, Duration arithmetic
Reference & learn	Learn & Reference, Checklists, Decode raw text
Logbook & admin	Per-diem (Pro), Scratchpad, Voyage reports

Two honest framings worth knowing before you lean on the planning helpers. The Flight plan form builds a correctly bracketed ICAO FPL message you can copy or share as text - it files nothing, and says so on screen: "Helper only - file through an approved channel; verify against the current ICAO FPL format & your ANSP's requirements." And Voyage reports are informal personal write-ups: anything you share out of them carries "Personal record only - not a formal occurrence report."

The Scratchpad is the odd one out - not a screen but a quick sheet for ATIS copies, clearances and gate numbers, and its tile shows a dot whenever something is written on it.

The descent family

Descent & approach is the biggest family - eight calculators behind one hub: Required ROD, Top of descent, Required gradient, CDFA profile, Stepdown fixes, Altitude gates, Visual approach and VDP, with a plain-English guide below them explaining the maths they share. Every screen in the family carries the module's framing, verbatim: "Approximate - use approved procedures."

One hub, eight calculators, one honest footer on every screen.

Here is Top of descent worked: FL350 down to 10,000 ft on a 3.0 degree path. The answer leads - 78.51 NM out, drawn as a profile - and a 3:1 cross-check (the rule-of-thumb 3 NM per 1,000 ft, 75.0 NM here) sits beside it so the computed figure is never your only reference. Your inputs are still on the screen below the answer, and the tool remembers them next time you open it.

Result first: 78.51 NM to TOD, with the 3:1 rule cross-check right beside it.

A result worth keeping can be handed on: Send to... passes a one-line summary - inputs, answer, and a "Reference only" stamp with the UTC time it was computed - to your notes and other parts of the app. Nothing is fed anywhere silently; the handoff is always your tap.

Crosswind

The crosswind tool takes a runway number and the wind, and shows the picture two ways: a compass rose with the runway laid through it and the wind arrow on it, or an approach view down the centreline.

Type runway 27 and wind 240 at 15 kt and the components resolve to a 13.0 kt headwind and 7.5 kt of crosswind from the left. Note the caution printed right beside the inputs: runway numbers are magnetic, so enter the magnetic wind from the tower or ATIS - a METAR reports wind in true degrees, and it should not go straight into this tool without applying local variation. The guide repeats it because the app does: the trap is real.

The Crosswind tool's inputs and result: wind direction 240 and speed 15 kt, the caution that runway numbers are magnetic while METAR wind is true, then the output card - headwind 13.0 kt, crosswind 7.5 kt from the left - and a Send to button — Components plus the honest caution: magnetic runway, true METAR wind - mind the variation.

Decode raw text

Weather and NOTAMs do not always arrive through the app - they turn up in company emails, ACARS printouts and OPS briefings. Decode raw text takes whatever you paste - a METAR, TAF or NOTAM, several at once - and runs the app's own decoders on it, entirely on the device. The paste card says the quiet part out loud: "Informational only - not for operational use."

The decoded card reads like the app's own weather screens - cloud, ceiling, temperature, QNH - but the provenance line is deliberately different: "Source: pasted text - decoded on device." No provider is claimed, because there was no fetch. If the report's day-and-time groups carry no month or year, the tool says which date it resolved them against and warns that an older report may resolve to the wrong day. Nothing pasted here is saved, and the screen ends with the weather framing, verbatim: "Reference only - verify officially."

The decoded METAR's detail: cloud FEW 3,500 ft, no ceiling reported, an estimated cumuliform cloud base, temperature 18 and dewpoint 12, QNH 1013 hPa - then the line Source: pasted text, decoded on device, a note about resolving day and time groups against the decode date, and the footer Reference only, verify officially — Decoded honestly: the source is your own paste, and the footer still says verify officially.

Checklists

Checklists are personal, reusable and resettable. The app ships four presets - Approach briefing, Pre-departure (airline), Pre-flight (GA) and Shutdown - and you can run them as they are, clone and edit them, or build your own from scratch. Tap a checklist to run it; every run starts clean.

These are personal aides-memoire, and the runner frames them exactly that way, verbatim: "Reference only - not a certified checklist." Your aircraft's approved checklist remains the checklist.

Per-diem Pro

The one Pro tool in the tab. Per-diem is a single workspace for layover money: log expenses by trip (receipt photos included), estimate a whole trip from your logged duties, keep company or US GSA rate cards, and pull tax-year and monthly reports as PDF or CSV. It is records and arithmetic, not advice - the workspace says so on screen, verbatim: "Records & estimates only - not financial advice."

The Per-diem workspace: a Total logged card reading Nothing logged yet with zero expenses, trips and currencies, segments for Expenses, Estimate, Reports and Rates, an Add an expense button, an empty state offering Estimate from duties, and the footer Records and estimates only, not financial advice — The per-diem workspace - expenses, estimates, rates and reports on one page.

One honesty note: if you logged expenses before Per-diem became a Pro tool, your rows stay on your device, and the plain CSV export stays free

your own records are never locked behind a paywall. Free vs Pro has the full pricing picture.

Doorways from the rest of the app

You rarely need to start from the Tools tab. Home carries a Quick tools grid you can customise, and a flight folder's More pane carries a tools row for the day you are briefing - see Brief. The calculators meet your data halfway, too: with a flight active, tools like Crosswind and Top of descent offer an explicit "Use active flight" chip to pull the frozen METAR wind or your planned cruise level - always a tap you choose, never a silent fill. And the Learn & Reference tile jumps to the Learn tab's guides and quick references, from the phonetic alphabet to Q-codes.

Where next

Home - the Quick tools grid and how to customise it.
Brief - the briefing package the folder's tools row belongs to.
Weather - the station workbench behind the weather these tools cross-check.
Free vs Pro - what Pro unlocks, priced.